Playing ZAngbandTK, you come across a lot of familiar entities. Anyone who has read Zelazny’s Amber series, or Lord Of The Rings, or the Cthulhu mythos, will recognize any number of enemies. But there’s one monster that goes back – way, way, back – to the dawn.

Creeping coins. Maybe you remember them from Wizardry. I sure do. Of all the strange and wildly weird (or weirdly wild) critters in all the games I’ve played, these I’ve never forgotten.

You sit there and look at the screen. Creeping coins? Creeping coins? Could anything be more preposterous than a handful of change scuttling your way? Yet there was something eerie and unsettling about them. And not just because: “A creeping coin calls for help!”

Perhaps it was because coins are such prosaic things – and here they are, suddenly turned into deadly monsters. Speaking of monsters, even the Christmas Tree Monster (blinking its lights, swishing its tinsel) from Beyond Zork didn’t evoke the same feelings.

So what have you come across that was odd and bizarre and different? Not the mundane stuff like demons and elementals and ravening beasts (and how jaded I am to call these “mundane”!). Something more like those creeping coins.

Y’know, when I think about it, I feel they missed a bet with those coins. They could have had a pile of nickels, dimes, and pennies inching your way, screaming, “No quarter! No quarter!” But of course, that would have reduced them to only a bad joke ;)

The action RPG Wibarm had a sub-boss monster called “Slimy George.” As the Qwestbusters review put it, one wonders who George was and whom he annoyed at publisher Broderbund. I don’t remember what Slimy George looked like, but I think he was a slimier, taller version of a Pac-Man ghost.

The game also featured a girl called Laker. Laker Girl, eh? I never found out what happened to her… probably eaten by Slimy George.

How about the most unusual monster of all? You go to open a chest to get some gold to reward you for your efforts. And then all of a sudden it attacks you. Do anyone remember the minmic? Well, I always knew that mimics are always looking for a hand out. They really love finger food and lady fingers.

And speaking of bad joke monsters, remember the one that JVC pulled on you, Scorpia, in the Mines of Terra (M&M III)??

Scorpia, I know full well M&M III is called The Isles of Terra. But it was only in the MINES of Terra where you encountered this strange monster with the unusual name of Scorpia if I’m not mistaken. Talk about a bad joke!

Mimics were originally a “DM Special” monster from D&D. Their purpose was almost identical to that which they serve in computer RPGs – as something to “trip up” players when the game became too predictable (a bigger problem in OD&D, which had a pretty small list of monsters, treasures, and rules).

Wibarm was a lot like Thexder with a thin gloss of 3D maze exploration and RPG added. Defeating alien monsters made your transformer jet more powerful, and you were supposed to find out what happened to a team of scientists who vanished, Laker Girl among them. As with Thexder, game balance was poor and cheating one’s stats way up was about the only way to make progress. Typical ill-balanced late-80s Japanese computer game.

Actually, the yolk’s on me. Despite what idiot Google alleged–thanks for the always-great search-result aging, geniuses–Urban Dictionary has removed all meanings for Slimy George. Bonus Google stupidity points: only the search-result blurb for UD’s SG page survives. The Google cache [sic] of that document “does not match any documents.” Oh, how I love it when Google’s left hand doesn’t know what its right hand is doing.

In the DC Heroes game, if your character uses magic, you’re supposed to have weird subplots to emphasize the fact that wizards suffer in that universe. I came up with one in which my character, for a couple of adventures, would keep changing into other hero forms (all worth fewer points than my original) – I designed some, my DM others.

Well, one of my forms was “Oakshutter – The Fighting Tree!” (yes, that one was my idea). He had lots of little windows and doors around his body, so that he could flash bright lights or pop out various tools (his usual choice of weapons was a boxing glove on a fast hydraulic puncher). At this time, there was a device in the middle of the earth that stopped my character from talking (designed to ruin my spellcasting). For Oakshutter, no problem – he simply popped out a gramophone, playing a record of whatever he wanted to say.

The other PC at the time was Tuatara – secret identity: Elizabeth Argent. The player was a little freaked by my current form (“Our leader…is a TREE!! I am following A TREE into battle!”). Well, our next adventure featured an enemy with the Anagram Gun. You can just imagine. Oakshutter was transformed into a Trout Shake (a big cup with a fish swimming in it – quite unable to attack). For Tuatara, the DM used her secred ID name, and she became a Lithe Zebra Gent (which means she still had enough dex to utterly defeat the holder of the gun – of course it was destroyed).

Other forms from that subplot included Dig Pig (who had an interesting adventure in stage acting), Lazy Daisy, Versepalm, Melissa the Dream Queen, and a couple of forms that weren’t used before the thing ended: Wet Blanket and (one of the DM’s ideas), Carp Deum (not “Carpe Diem,” “seize the day,” but “Carp Deum,” the “Carp of God”). But I think you’ve heard enough.

Not exactly a weird monster, but definitely a memorable one. On my first play thru of Phantisee, I desecrated a statue in a temple and Zeus showed up to turn my party into bloody pulp to decorate his temple. At that point I decided I was going to make a party specifically to kill him. 6 Dwarven Wizards later (only 2 of which survived the fight) Zeus was defeated. That was my first experience with giving a race a non-suited class. Prior to that I did the predictable elf or half-elf ranger, halfling rogue, etc… the expected cliches in each game. :)

X, I knew I could count on you to come up with something weird. Oakshutter sounds vaguely familiar; I think you mentioned him to me once. Quite an original idea (love the boxing glove). The Anagram Gun is nifty too; Trout Shake, hehe. That must have been one fun campaign.

grassblade, maybe that was the awful Fountain of Dreams? I have done my best to forget that one, but the clowns sound familiar.

DB, congrats on that one. It’s not every player who can manage to kill a god. Just goes to show, there’s usually a way around everything, if you can only find it.